O Illinois: Reflections on Postcards in Film

O Illinois

I’m sending you a Hollywood postcard

a Collateral[1]lush island visor

a Dark City[2]Shell Beach nightmare

a six-year-old’s walk

on packed sand

bending for green sea glass

stretching toward gorged pelicans

climbing a palmetto lined sea wall

when the sun blisters.

In a neighbor’s yard

dogs race around a collapsed pool.

A boxer jumps a fence

landing in soft snow.

---

[1] Collateral. Dir. Michael Mann. Perf. Tom Cruise, Jamie Fox. Paramount, 2004. DVD.

[2] Dark City. Dir. Alex Proyas. Perf. Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly. New Line Cinema, 1998. DVD.

Chato's Land (1972) and Environmental Adaptation

 

Western films in which American Indian characters are highlighted rest on this idea of adapting horrific environments into homes, on what we call narratives of environmental adaptation. Although westerns with American Indians at the center or on their edges do construct American Indians as either savage or noble “others,” the films also (and most importantly for us) demonstrate how effectively American Indians have adapted, and adapted to, what white settlers see as an environmental “hell” or something worse. As the Fort Lowell commander Major Cartwright (Douglass Watson) puts it in Ulzana’s Raid (1972),

“You know what General Sheridan said of this country, lieutenant? ... If he owned hell and Arizona, he’d live in hell and rent out Arizona.”

In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, American Indians in a variety of western films adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home. This narrative of environmental adaptation continues even into contemporary western films set on and near reservation lands and gains particular force in Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals (1998).  Pardon Chato’s (Charles Bronson) perspective in Chato’s Land (1972) helps illustrate the parameters and repercussions of such environmental adaptation. The film highlights the Apache worldview from a white perspective but provides insight into how Chato, a half Apache mestizo,survives in what seems like uninhabitable land. According to Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance), when Chato runs from the captain because he killed a U.S. marshal in self-defense, he “picks his ground” carefully. Unlike white soldiers, Chato has adapted to this inhospitable land and can use it to his advantage in a fight. The captain explains the wisdom of Chato’s choice to run through Indian Territory: 

To you this is so much bad land—rock, scrub, desert and then more rock, a hard land that the sun has sucked all the good out of. You can’t farm it, and you can’t carve it out and call it your own… so you damn it to hell. And it all looks the same. That is our way. To the breed now, it’s his land. He don’t expect it to give him much, and he don’t force it none. And to him it’s almost human—a livin’ active thing. And it will make him a good place to make his fight against us.

This narrative of environmental adaptation evolves in U.S. western films with American Indians at their center, from the early valorization of American Indian worldviews, through the vilification of the savage Indian in the 1940s and ’50s, back to a more revisionist, if condescending, look at American Indian perspectives from the 1950s and 60s through the 1990s that makes way for the Native-American-centered narratives to come. A review of Smoke Signalsin Rolling Stone asserts, “When it comes to American Indians, Hollywood either trades in Injun stereotypes or dances with Disney” (“Smoke Signals” Review).

Westerns as a genre tend to focus on Plains Indian tribes, the nomadic tribes in the plains settlers crossed to reach the West, with little distinction between tribes. But the films also respond to film history, a history that coincides with political and cultural history of both Hollywood and the United States as a whole. According to Simmon, “Indians may well have entered American film for the reason they came into the European tradition as a whole: Searching for stories to set in the landscape, pioneer filmmakers stumbled upon ‘Indians,’ the presumed men of nature” (4). Set in Eastern lush forests instead of desert plains, the narratives of these early silent westerns “are set entirely within tribal communities or feature a ‘noble redskin’ as guide or savior to the white hero” (4).

By 1914, however, Simmon asserts, American Indian actors and sympathetic narratives were no longer prominent in westerns at least partly because the “U. S. Army began planning, with some innocence, for America’s entry into World War I by requisitioning horses” (80). According to Simmon, “The subsequent history of Indian images in silent-era Hollywood becomes a story with two paths—one about war, the other about love—neither leading anywhere except Indian death” (81).  In spite of Simmon’s contention, at least a few westerns highlighting American Indian characters and narratives present a more sympathetic view of a possible comic evolutionary narrative, a narrative of environmental adaptation that reveals the ineffectiveness of a tragic evolutionary path and the intruder pioneers who seek destruction rather than adaptation. Chato’s Land  may attempt such a journey.

Love Serenade (1996): Ecofeminist Myth-making or Hetero-normative Wish

Love Serenade (1996): Ecofeminist Myth-making or Hetero-normative Wish

Set in Sunray, a backwater town on Australia's Murray River, there's little to do but fish or listen to the local radio station, Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade infuses Magical Realism to invoke what could be seen as an ecofeminist message. Although the story seems to focus primarily on the drive for romance and marriage in a patriarchal community, the fishing images and references suggest something more: a literal connection between humans and nature that merges Sunray with the river at its edge. 

On one level, the narrative of Love Serenade seems to perpetuate a patriarchal status quo. This normative plot’s conflicts begin when D.J. Ken Sherry (George Shevtsov) arrives from the hustle of Brisbane to run the small town radio station, where he plays 1960s and 70s love songs from Barry White and Glen Campbell that reinforce his ideology. Although he is in his mid-40s, detached, thrice divorced, and hatchet faced, two sisters living next door find him irresistible: Dimity (Miranda Otto) is an awkward twenty year-old, who works in a Chinese restaurant with few patrons and nudist owner Albert Lee (John Alansu). Vicki-Ann (Rebecca Frith) is a perky hairdresser with a hope chest who invents a happy future with Sherry based on little but his arrival. First Dimity then Vicki-Ann spend the night with Sherry, one concluding he's her boy friend, the other her fiancé until both discover their mistake.

On another level, however, the film explores masculinity through an ecofeminist lens that draws on fish and fishing as metaphor. From this perspective the narrative reverses stereotypical alliances between women and nature, suggesting that at least one man’s “nature” aligns him more with the Marlin on his living room wall than with the “human” characters represented by Dimity, Vicki-Ann, and Albert Lee. 

To demonstrate this focus, the opening fishing scene compares the sport to the angling associated with romantic relationships. After close-ups of carp under water latching onto a hook, Dimity and Vicki-Ann reel it in, stringing it up with a comment, “some fish mate for life.” To amplify the angling metaphor, Vicki-Ann even offers the carp to Sherry, plying him with food for affection. His claim that he never eats seafood, however, takes the metaphor further, moving it into the realm of Magical Realism in which Sherry logically grows gills as he manifests the traits he attributes to the Marlin on his wall. 

Multiple scenes hint at Sherry’s transformation. Although he won’t eat them, he questions Dimity and Albert Lee repeatedly about the freshness of the restaurant’s prawns. To lure in Dimity, he asks her if she would like to see his fish, the giant stuffed Marlin on his wall. To illustrate his view of love, Sherry points to the Marlin, telling Dimity he is like the Marlin. For Dimity the fish is dead. For Sherry it’s free, unlike a pet fish in a tank or a lover in a committed relationship. Sherry even quotes the cliché, “to love something, set it free.”

The alliance between the hyper-masculine Sherry and the Marlin grows stronger when Sherry seduces Vicki-Ann. Dimity begins to notice gills on Sherry’s neck that foam when he gargles. Later Dimity sits in Sherry’s living room while Sherry and Vicki-Ann “mate” and watches the Marlin from the couch. The Marlin jumps from the wall, crashing to the floor and foreshadowing Sherry’s future fate. Sherry rejects both Dimity and Vicki-Ann and meets a violent death in a fall from a grain silo, but the film ends not on shore but on the river, where, after the sisters drop him into the water, Sherry completely transforms into the fish he emulates. The sisters scream as he swims away, trailing an “I wuv you” balloon behind him. In Love Serenade, Shirley Barrett complicates the romantic revenge plot by exploring it beside and in the Murray River. It’s still unclear, however, whether that choice perpetuates patriarchy or (re)creates an ecofeminist myth.

Reflections on Bird People (2014) and The Bird People In China (1998)

Doodle Poll (Calendar View)

She regrets

she’s unable to meet today.

Yesterday

she looked out over a low creek

turning into a heron

snaking between sumacs,

one of the bird people

gliding with starched cotton wings

thinking only

“I’m hungry”

as she dived.

Louisiana Story and Separation Between Humans and the Natural World

Louisiana Story and Separation Between Humans and the Natural World

The support for oil drilling and its benefits illustrated in Louisiana Story should come as no surprise because the Standard Oil Company financed the film. Despite clear evidence that oil drilling cannot leave the water and land around it untouched, the film and its reviewers assert the opposite, demonstrating through the experience of oil drillers and a Cajun boy that human and nonhuman nature can maintain separate existences and thrive. Instead of emphasizing the interdependent relationship between humans and the natural world, Louisiana Storysuggests that to maintain the innocence of nature in the bayou, and of its more natural Cajun inhabitants, a humanity more aligned with culture and technology must leave wild nature behind, entering it only briefly and with caution to avoid an indelible affect. Two myths are perpetuated by the film, then: the myth that oil drilling can leave a natural setting untouched, and the myth that humans are somehow separate from nature rather than interconnected with it. 

Louisiana Story perpetuates these two myths through both its aesthetic and its narrative. Close-ups of a pristine bayou open Louisiana Story. Flowers, an alligator, and a heron on an evergreen tree emphasize the film’s naturalistic setting. A lone boy poles through weeping cypress trees in a small boat. We see the bayou from his point of view, including water below him. A narrator describes the scene, even mentioning werewolves to set the mythic tone of this innocent scene. The boy wears salt on his waist and something inside his shirt to protect him from all that bubbles, we are told and smiles at a raccoon in a tree, connecting him to both natural and supernatural elements. A snake, gators, and grasses blowing in the wind continue the scene.

When the boy shoots at an animal, and the pristine scene is disrupted, the conflicting element in the film is introduced: modernism in the shape of oil drilling in the bayou.  Other explosions take the gunshot’s place, then, as wheeled machinery drive up into the bayou. The machine looks like a tractor, a cultivator cutting a path through the grass. The boy floats away, demonstrating the separation between culture and nature the film perpetuates. The boy and his Cajun family represent an innocence that is untouched by civilization. When the boy heads home to his Cajun family, a family structure more in touch with the natural world is introduced. Their cabin sits beside the bayou and can only be accessed by boat. Inside the cabin, the boy’s father talks about “gators” in a Cajun accent to a lean cut younger man, reinforcing his connection to nature. The boy’s mother does offer coffee, a connection with culture, but the boy’s entrance by boat at his parent’s dock again highlights how isolated this family is from society. The blasting that continues, however, contrasts and conflicts with this innocent, more “natural” scene, highlighting the intervention on display. Modern culture has entered the pristine wilderness of the bayou and infiltrated the innocent Cajun family that is still tied to the natural world. To seal this connection, the oil drillers offer lease agreements to the boy’s father: “Can that thing really tell where oil is?” the older man asks, and signs his name to a contract. 

Evidence in the film, however, suggests that nature and culture can and must remain separated. The oilmen, representing culture, leave the rustic cabin in their speedboat. Later the boy and his raccoon, representing nature, watch the oilmen from their rowboat as the drillers prepare to build their rig and platform. The boy fishes while Cajuns hunt along a pristine shore, further connecting them to the natural world. We get a view of homes on the shore from a houseboat, and a shore view of the motorboat and its wake. The boy and raccoon continue watching, and the wake of the motorboat throws him out of his boat, so he is literally connected with the natural world. But the boy seems fascinated with the elements of culture brought by the oilmen and watches a man survey the area and a tall rig rolling up the bayou to the spot the surveyor has indicated. The boy and his raccoon watch this modern scene from the safety of nature—the waters and fecund grasses of the bayou. They remain innocent, smiling as they observe without relinquishing their connection with the natural world.

The rig contrasts with the natural scene around it, maintaining its separation from the natural world. The technology of the rig and the oil drilling it represents become a beautiful and powerful opposition to the peaceful bayou. Steam surrounds the rig, and we hear the pumping sounds of the drill. Although the boy talks to a couple of oilmen and asks what they are doing, he does not board the rig when invited. Instead, he paddles away, reinforcing his separation, and watching from his boat as the long drill comes out of the well, so worn down, the drillers must replace it.  A sunset over the bayou further separates the mechanization of oil drilling from the natural scene, which the boy and his boat both envelop and represent.

The separation between culture and nature continues even after the boy boards the rig for a closer look. The film shows the whole process of preparing the drill before the boy goes on board to see for himself. The rig is loud as chains swing around pipes to tighten and loosen connections. We cannot hear the boy and oilman’s conversation but see them smile, suggesting a connection between them and, consequently, a connection between culture and nature beyond the economic vision of ecology supported by the film’s narrative. 

After this long segment demonstrating the process of oil drilling, however, the scene shifts back to the boy and his raccoon in the bayou and, in a long sequence, highlights a battle between elements of nature. The boy leaves his raccoon and examines eggs left by an alligator. When the gator comes back on shore, the boy and we see the ‘gator eggs hatch. The boy holds a baby gator until the mother gator roars, and the boy runs away. The raccoon is now loose and swims up on a log, but the gator is close behind. The boy searches for his pet and passes representatives of wild nature: a spider in a web, a rabbit, a skunk, singing birds, and a deer. When he sees the broken line on the boat and realizes the coon has escaped, he fears the gator has killed the coon. In a parallel to the boy’s fears, the gator devours a water bird, so the boy sets a gator trap to avenge his friend’s death. His attempts fail alone, however, but his father has been searching for him and helps him out of the water, telling him, “We’ll get him.”  Together they kill the alligator, it seems. Although we do not see the actual slaughter, we assume it occurs because father and son visit the oilrig and bring the gator’s skin to show the drillers on board, holding it up for them to admire from their rowboat.

This resolution of the battle between human and nonhuman nature is paralleled on the rig with a battle between humans and elements of culture when one of the oilmen, Tom, tests oil levels. Any connection between culture and nature ends once the oilmen test the oil and find it good. The lease money from the father’s contract buys groceries and a new pot for mom, and a new rifle for the boy, but the family members continue to speak Cajun without translation. Despite the relative prosperity the lease money brings to the family, the last two scenes from the film perpetuate the separation between nature and culture and suggest that human intervention—even oil drilling—can leave the natural world pure and untouched. In the first of these scenes, the boy sees his raccoon in the tree, complete with the rope collar around its neck, so boy and ‘coon are reunited and, consequently, the boy is reconnected with the natural world. In the second and last of these two scenes, the derrick leaves slowly, and oil is pumped through a pipeline under the bayou and hidden from the natural world.  The boy and his pet watch the process and wave goodbye to the rig, its oilmen and the culture they represent. Only a lone Christmas tree-like pole remains, and it is now more tree than derrick, a tangible claim in the film that human exploitation of nature’s resources can leave its pure innocence untouched.

Critique of the Oil Frontier and the Spectacle Behind it in Comes a Horseman

Critique of the Oil Frontier and the Spectacle Behind it in

Comes a Horseman

Oil Drilling films from Cimarron (1931 and 1960) to There Will be Blood (2007) illustrate well the ongoing conflict between eco-disaster on display and spectacle, a conflict between an explicit and implicit environmental message and the “sensuous elaboration” that, as Susan Sontag argues, filmic representations provide (212) . Whether the films respond to environmental history from the 19^thCentury, the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or today, that conflict remains. We assert, however, that reading these images in relation to environmental history can make the sometimes disastrous workings behind spectacular oil events transparent. 

The less well-known Comes a Horseman(1978) serves as an apt illustration, since it reveals the environmental disasters behind resource exploitation while grappling with questions regarding ranching and oil frontiers. The film pits ranch owners Ella Connors (Jane Fonda) and Frank “Buck” Athearn (James Caan) against Jacob “J. W.” Ewing (Jason Robards) and his oil-developing friend, Neil Atkinson (George Grizzard). The film is set in post-World War II Montana but illustrates the conflict between oil and cattle ranching immediately. Atkinson is negotiating with Ewing to drill on his land and claims from the film’s beginning that “oil and cattle are not incompatible.” 

Ewing, however, still sees his ranch as a heartland and looks toward a painting of buffalo racing across a prairie to reinforce his point. Ewing wishes to own the ranch land in the valley, but it is unclear at this point whether he supports oil drilling instead of ranching. Ewing’s henchmen kill off one new rancher and injure another, Frank, thinking they will scare him into selling Ewing his land. Frank pairs up with Ella when she takes him back to her ranch and nurses him. Together Frank and Ella defeat Ewing and Atkinson, saving their land from both Ewing and oil production.

The first conflict they encounter concerns whether Ella can earn enough money from her cattle to save her ranch once her husband is dead. With only Dodger (Richard Farnsworth) to help her round up her cattle, she seems doomed to failure, but Frank talks her into becoming partners for the season, so they work together to round up both of their ranches’ cattle.

The second conflict begins when a geologist comes to the ranch to test for oil. He checks with Ella about getting a seismic record and completing the tests, but Ella refuses. Here Frank again partners with Ella, making clear that he too rejects oil drilling because it “means they’re going to tear the earth apart.” He has “seen places where they’ve drilled for oil” and knows the score. 

Ewing, on the other hand, is under the thumb of a banker, Virgil Hoverton (Macon McCalman), and must agree to allow them to test for oil on his land. We hear blasts from an oil test, and, as if to reinforce the impact of blasting on the environment, Dodger is thrown from his horse and breaks his ribs. The conflict between Ewing and Ella accelerates because Ewing also wants Ella and may lose his ranch if no oil is found there. 

Before leaving, the geologist leaves a report that says seismic shooting brings up no good test area on his ranch. Good drilling is only available on Ella’s ranch, so they must drill diagonally from Ewing’s land to Ella’s, in order to strike oil. They need Ella’s permission in order to continue. Virgil tries to take Ewing’s ranch, but Ewing kills Atkinson, the oilman, in a plane crash and kills Virgil at Ella’s house. The battle then is between Ewing and Frank, with Ella as the prize. Ultimately Frank and Ella survive. Ella has lost her house but has kept her land. 

Comes a Horseman critiques oil drilling in several ways. It illustrates how oil exacerbates greed, when Virgil attempts to undermine even the cattle baron, Ewing. It also explains how oil drilling tears up the land because Frank has witnessed the effects of drilling and rejects them. Finally it critiques oil testing and drilling in a more general and dramatic way because it is associated with Dodger’s fall from his horse. More importantly, the film avoids the reliance on spectacle and the spectacular evident in most oil frontier western films. The seismic tests and blasting are heard only at a distance, and the violent confrontations are resolved. In this context, the notion of spectacle obscures or even erases ecological readings, but primarily the film highlights the disastrous environmental consequences of oil drilling rather than their spectacular effects.

Yangtze Drift (2014) and Audience

Readings of John Rash's documentary Yangtze Drift (2014) depend on the audience viewing this non-narrative documentary. An audience familiar with the history and context of the river and the Three Gorges Dam will view the film differently than will an audience unfamiliar with that context or observing it only from the outside.

For us, this beautiful documentary short broaches issues explored in Up the Yangtze (2007), which showcases lives transformed by the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest hydroelectric dam in history. Yangtze Drift provides a seemingly objective view of the river environment and its people, but it also left us with multiple questions:

·      What does the audience think about the environmental consequences to the Yangtze now that the dam is complete?

·      Is this river now placid because of this result?

·      How would an outside audience understand the changes created by the dam?

·      Do local audiences who watch it accept these changes as natural? How does the rhetoric differ for this audinence?

·      Do they accept the new eco-system created by the dam as something that remains unquestioned?

·      What changes have occurred off screen?

From an outsider perspective, waving weeds open and close Yangtze Drift and serve as both an introduction to the drifting river and a frame for this direct cinema poem.

After an overhead shot of the river, we hear singing before the film fades to black and changes scenes to another overhead shot on shore of buildings, trees, and ruined skyscrapers.

The shot pans past this part of the city to a highway near the shore. Shots of cars seem to roll into images boats and the river. From above the Yangtze looks silent and flat, but as the camera moves closer, we see ripples. As if peering through tourists’ lenses, we see flowing shore grasses and a smaller boat passing by.

A man rows and sings. Other rippled surfaces reflect the water—an old woman’s face, shadows of waves on a wall where the river seems to have flooded up to a door.

Other scenes show people looking out windows at the river. One takes pictures. A boat floats by.

When rain begins, ripples in geometric shapes form in wash basins and large noodle pots. Shot in low angle, the flow of water seems to transform a street into a stream. The rain continues in the widening river, forming works of abstract art on the water.

Tourists on board a tour boat photograph the river and shore under umbrellas. Here the river is surrounded by cliffs. A small motorboat goes by the larger tour boat, revealing the lack of diegetic sound on board. We hear murmurings of voices, but the small boat’s loud engine stands out.

Back on shore at another spot on the river, people exercise on a beach. A fisherman drips his line in the water off some rocks.

Across the river, a city appears, and the camera shifts again to another overhead shot of skyscrapers lit for night. The pan of this city moves down to young people on steps beside the river listening to a band play “Let it Be” from the Beatles. A woman with a dog wades in the water. Vendors sell barbecue on sticks. Couples look out at lit skyscrapers. Cell phones are everywhere.

This pan transforms into part of what looks like a tourism film of the evolution of a mega city. On various screens, images of birds on the river appear. A poster advertises the Tribe of the Three Gorges, but includes pictures of women with machine guns, as well. A rapidly moving tour bus goes past, and then we are on board among the diverse tourists of various races and nationalities. The river is wide and deep. A tour guide points out various sites, including a dam under construction. Is it the Three Gorges Dam? The explanation of the huge mountains on both sides is in English.

But then it seems we are back to our opening setting. We hear thunder and watch the singing man row his boat. Shadows of water ripples replicate the river on the walls he passes. A note on a boat claims this is the number one water town in China. Pedestrians cross over a bridge. Crowds walk by the camera. Boats float on the water and birds float over grasses blowing in the breeze. The screen grows darker and the film ends.

When the title comes up, however, it shows a drawing of the bridge and the filmmaker’s name end the film, leaving us wondering if both the river environment and the human constructions around it are artificial. This view of the river is making a statement, but that statement differs according to the audience viewing it.